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We Asked Sally Ride All the Wrong Questions

When I set out to find the most profound things Sally Ride said throughout her career, I realized we missed a huge opportunity as journalists. Mush together the thousands of words and hours of video footage, and you'll get one really long, repetitive interview. That's because we often asked her the same questions: What's it like to be the only woman in a boys club? What advice can you give women? How can we get more girls to love science?

Perhaps that's because we couldn't move past Sally the icon and get to know Sally the person. We fixated on the fact that a woman was going to space — a first for America, but old news to the Soviets. However, we couldn't see past our own noses and treated her as the first woman in space — period.

To be fair, those questions were OK to ask in the 1980s. The problem is that we were still asking Sally those questions in 2012. We turned her into a mascot for feminism, even though she never asked for that. With a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford, Sally was first and foremost a scientist. That was how she saw herself, and the fact that we didn't was our mistake.

Before writing this column, I took a step back and asked myself if my cynicism stemmed from my own narrow viewpoint as a writer. Then an email hit my inbox with an opportunity to interview Ashley Stroupe, a NASA engineer working on the Mars rover team. IEEE's PR hook was something to the tune of "talk to a NASA scientist who was inspired by Sally Ride."

When I got on the phone with Ashley, I had no agenda, no planned questions. I was unprepared, having dedicated so much time to watching and reading Sally Ride interviews. So that's probably why, within the first 15 seconds, I blurted, "Why did people always ask Sally about being the first American woman in space? That annoys me. Why did no one care about the science?"

I heard an exasperated sigh on the other end of the line.

"I still get a lot of that, too," Ashley said. She was the first woman to drive a rover on Mars, a fact she didn't realize until the media pointed it out.

"I inevitably get questions about women working at NASA, 'How hard is it to be a girl at NASA?' [...] The truth of the matter is I'm not the only woman — far from it — but there's still that perspective out here."

Ashley added that this notion is especially prevalent in schools.

"[Students] form their ideas of NASA from movies and TV, and the reputation there is still not very prevalent, so I try to be very patient," she said.

So, what questions should we have asked Sally?

"We should have been talking about the science. I would have asked her what drew her to physics and what part of that compelled her to go out into space," Ashley said.

Granted, some reporters asked Sally why she wanted to go to space. (To which she bluntly replied, "If someone doesn't know why, I can't explain it.") But that basic question proves those reporters didn't get it. What they should have been asking: As a physicist, what personal scientific question did you seek to answer?

It is this deep connection to something as vast as space that makes science tangible for the layman — and, more importantly, for young students, a platform Sally championed later in life. We missed an opportunity to extract this passion from Sally. We missed the chance to ask a brilliant scientist a question about the higher meaning of it all. Instead, we asked about getting her period in orbit. (Of course, there were some outliers. Some journalists balanced questions both mainstream and scientific.)

This week, the space industry celebrates two milestones: the 50-year anniversary of women in space (Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first female in space) and the 30-year mark of Sally Ride's first trip into orbit.

But why do we still recognize these dates? Because, despite all our progress in other realms of gender equality, we can't get past the division in science. More so, the public perception of women in stereotypical male roles remains narrow. (Just ask Elise Andrews of 'I Fucking Love Science'.)

When equality is truly engrained into our DNA, no one will pay attention to the gender of the person behind the science. It will just be incredible work — and we won't need anniversaries to recognize that.

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